A bad ruling that allows unequal representation

Voters line up outside a polling station in Austin in 2016. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday upheld Texas’ redistricting maps that challengers — and a lower court — said intentionally discriminated.

Voters line up outside a polling station in Austin in 2016. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday upheld Texas’ redistricting maps that challengers — and a lower court — said intentionally discriminated.

Photo: File Photo /New York Times

Photo: File Photo /New York Times

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Voters line up outside a polling station in Austin in 2016. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday upheld Texas’ redistricting maps that challengers — and a lower court — said intentionally discriminated.

Voters line up outside a polling station in Austin in 2016. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday upheld Texas’ redistricting maps that challengers — and a lower court — said intentionally discriminated.

Photo: File Photo /New York Times

A bad ruling that allows unequal representation

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Here’s all you need to know about the absurdity of the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling Monday that the Texas Legislature did not intentionally discriminate against voters of color in all but one of the districts contested when it redistricted for this decade.

Minorities were 90 percent of the population growth recorded by the 2010 census, with Latinos 66 percent of the total. So, Texas gained four new congressional seats — yet none of the districts were drawn to give minorities more representation. This in a state whose maps have been successfully challenged for four decades because they denied voters, mostly minorities, fair representation. This in a majority-minority state with congressional and legislative representation that inadequately reflects that.

So notorious was Texas’ discrimination that it was lumped with other states whose changes to voting laws required preclearance by the Justice Department. That changed in 2013 when the Supreme Court gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.

No, to arrive at this conclusion of no intentional discrimination, the court majority had to do some things intentionally itself. Foremost among these was for Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, to ignore the clear evidence and the compelling findings of a lower court that Texas legislators purposely rigged these maps to preserve Anglo power at the expense of minority voters.

Among these actions: After a federal district court invalidated the maps drawn in 2011, the Legislature in special session in 2013 adopted court-drawn maps that the court said had to be temporary because they were hastily crafted under a deadline and still flawed.

Legislators rushed to approve these — though taking time to make one district so discriminatory that even this court said it was — to circumvent rules that might have posed obstacles. It was all part of a strategy to deny challengers a remedy. After all, these were court-drawn maps, forget the court’s caveats.

There were legal challenges nonetheless. These went against the state. Though the lower court issued no injunction, the state appealed. Alito wrote that the court’s prescription — fix the maps before the election — was tantamount to an injunction, so Texas had standing to appeal.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing a dissent joined by the three other liberal members of the court, expertly explained why the majority had to ignore clear appellate rules to even hear the case. But she was most correct in how she summed up what the majority had just done: “The court today does great damage to the right of equal opportunity. Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement.”

Earlier in the opinion, she wrote, “It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas — despite constituting a majority of the population within the state — will continue to be underrepresented in the political process.”

This Texas case was about racial and ethnic gerrymandering — redistricting to deny minorities fair representation. But, last week, the high court punted on partisan gerrymandering — drawing lines to disadvantage one or the other political party. In Texas these days, it’s the GOP drawing the lines to hold on to power. In the past, it’s been Democrats.

And, in fact, Texas argued earlier in the process that its maps were OK because they were drawn for partisan, not racial or ethnic, advantage.

The court’s ruling on racial gerrymandering and its punting on partisan gerrymandering likely mean Texas’ minority voters will have to wait another two years or so before they can get relief on either score. In Texas, racial and partisan gerrymandering are essentially one in the same because Latinos and African-Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

And the consequence of these two decisions is that Texas’ notions of fairness will continue to bear little resemblance to either fairness or justice. And they demonstrate anew the need for Texas to create an independent redistricting commission to take the process out of legislators’ gerrymandering hands altogether.